Why I Still Use Twitter (But Hope To Switch Soon)

By far the angriest emails and comments I receive are from readers who are upset that I link to Twitter (or as Elon Musk has for some reason renamed it, “X”) for my research and for my videos in Saturday’s Just for Xeets and Giggles.

And look, I get it, especially for those who have not heard my explanation before. Twitter is a toxic place, and Musk is the worst kind of human, so I take each angry email or comment as an indication that people’s values are in the right place, even if their manners sometimes don’t reflect that.

Because there are a lot of new readers here, and because I have a bit of an update to the current situation, I want to lay out my reasons and the limitations I and others face.

I agree that, in a better world, I could also be free from having to go to Musk’s garbage platform to do my daily work. It’s exhausting. I deal with racists, trolls, gaslighters, bullies and even threats of violence every day. I’m happy to wade into this jungle so that none of you has to.

But why do it at all? That’s an excellent question with a non-intuitive answer. The sad fact is, all of the journalists, analysts, data scientists, legal experts, politicians and political pundits that I follow daily are on Twitter and have not migrated consistently to any other platform, though there has been an exodus to Bluesky lately. I was hoping that Threads could take Twitter’s place, but so far it is only a sliver of the political content that I need to create and write my daily pieces. Indeed, Threads (and Instagram and Facebook) have intentionally diminished the reach of political content. Not a great place to invest for the future.

Perhaps as Bluesky gains critical mass, and more importantly critical daily usage by the thought leaders and experts I read on a daily basis, I can move my research completely over to that platform.

As it is, I already lead the team that manages and operates the second largest Bluesky account: George Takei. Give him a follow here and you will get to see much of my work as well. We are approaching 800,000 followers there, nearly 5% of the total user base. That’s encouraging!

George and I have been “mind melded” on politics for well over a decade after we helped him launch and operate his YouTube, Twitter and Facebook accounts. He now has 25 million fans across those platforms plus Threads, Mastadon and Bluesky. My “day job” continues to be the oversight and operation of these social media accounts, including all the digital publications that comprise the Takei content offering. I also am head of the publication of the substack he helped found, The Big Picture. (I hope you are a subscriber!)

On the specific question of my continued daily use of Twitter, most other writers are in the same pickle I find myself in. The best news and analysis, especially breaking news, still happens on Twitter, so Substackers such as Heather Cox Richardson and Joyce Vance, for example, who also write daily, are still on Twitter, though again we’ll see if Bluesky can eventually take its place. I already check the feeds at Bluesky first each day, and the amount of quality content is rising daily. It’s just not quite enough to abandon Twitter, much as I’d love to!

My collection of funnies each Saturday in Just for Xeets and Giggles would not be possible to do on any other platform, so long as the content creators do not migrate. I find these memes and quips incidentally to my research, so wherever I am scrolling, that’s where I will find and gather together the week’s collection. Currently Bluesky does not support longer form video, so that’s another limitation.

That said, I now am trying to at least find comparable videos on other platforms before I publish my Saturday collection. It’s a time consuming process, and I’m not sure it’s worth doing yet, but I am trying. When I do find them, I make a note of that and seek provide an alternative, such as “TikTok link here.” If you do not wish to send traffic to Twitter, then by all means do not click on any Twitter links! But please do not also complain that the only alternatives I provide are TikTok (owned by the Chinese) or Facebook and Instagram (owned by another mercurial billionaire). Even YouTube is a poisonous place that has caused lots of damage to our democracy through its rabbit-holing algorithms. This is simply the world we live in, sadly.

I hope the above helps explain the unfortunate current situation. I wish there were a workable solution available right now. But for me to continue to do this work, I could not leave Twitter cold turkey…at least not yet. Think of me and send your sympathies, however, because I have to put up with right wing MAGA comments and posts all day long just to do my work!

Jay